As the powerful volcano grumbles beneath their feet, one brave couple refused to let their fear take over and captured these beautiful pictures of lava breaking through the surface. The eruption at the Plosky Tolbachik volcano on Kamchatka Peninsula,

Marvelous! Incredible snaps present the stunning fantasy art by Takaki. She is a stunning artist with amazing creativity. She was born in Hokkaido, Japan she is a digital artist who works on amazing fantasy photographs of fare tale

Up the street, with a paddle A man rides a paddleboard in the streets of Buenos Aires, Argentina, on April 2. A violent storm with torrential rain and powerful wind left five people dead in the city as it knocked out power, downed trees and damaged home

Clouds of neon-colored powder enveloped villages across northern India last week as the spring Holi Festival began, coating people in a multitude of colors as in this photo submitted to National Geographic's Your Shot community on March 26

Puffins shed the colorful outer parts of their bills after the breeding season, leaving a smaller and duller beak. Their short wings are adapted for swimming with a flying technique under water. In the air, they need to beat their wings rapidly

The Elephant Nature Park is a rescue center for domesticated elephants near Chiang Mai in northern Thailand. Every day the elephants march down to the river to have a bath and be washed by tourists and volunteers.

Volcanic lightning is rare, and lightning between thunderstorms and ash clouds even more so. In this photo, taken in May 2009, lightning flashes between a thunderstorm and the eruption plume from Rabaul volcano on New Britain Island in Papua New Guinea

Birds have been one of the greatest subject for photographers for centuries now because they have an inspiring beauty and mystify us with their gift of flight and diversity. This should come as no surprise since birding is one of the world's most popular

Little says more about how civilisations once lived than a glimpse into the surviving ruins of the places that they inhabited. In Grytviken on South Georgia Island, gigantic whale bones and abandoned tanker ships tell the story of a civilization of whal

Blue Lagoon Geothermal Resort, Grindavík, Iceland The Blue Lagoon, one of Iceland's top attractions, holds six million litres of geothermal seawater which is renewed every 40 hours. The water's temperature is always between 37 and 39 C

Lenticular clouds pass in sweeping layers over the port village of Fionnphort on the Isle of Mull in the Inner Hebrides. The high-altitude lens-shaped formations often have a smooth, saucer-like shape and have sometimes been mistaken for UFOs.

Many sites in this world are considered strange - but only a few garner the status of being completely surreal, as if from a different planet. From Fly Geyser in Nevada (pictured) to the Gates of Hell in Turkmenistan, we uncovered a growing list of these

On Feb. 5, Sony announced the World Photography Awards shortlist of finalists in both professional and open categories. From over 120,000 submissions, this list of 43 images has been curated from submissions spanning 170 countries-- a record number of

These beautiful photos of the sky were created by stacking images of the same scene together by Photographer Matt Molloy. Usually photo stacking is used either to create HDR images or to increase depth of field of the camera or a time-lapse video. Mr Molloy used the same technique, albeit in a different way, to produce extra ordinary images of the sky that looks like smears or brush strokes.

84-year-old Dorli Rainey was pepper sprayed during a peaceful march in Seattle, Washington. She would have been thrown to the ground and trampled, but luckily a fellow protester and Iraq vet was there to save her. (Joshua Trujillo /

Beauty is a characteristic of a place, person, animal, object that provide a feeling of pleasure and satisfaction. And An Ideal beauty is a term which is approved and have some specific features for some specific areas and culture. And this word also

Grüner See, literally “Green Lake”, is a lake in Styria, Austria, near the town of Tragoss, located at the foot of the snow-capped Hochschwab mountains. During winter, the lake is only 1–2 meter deep and the surrounding area is used as a county park.

There's a good reason we like looking at photos of nature. There's a reason why we find them so beautiful and alluring. It is because, in our hearts, we miss the times we lived in harmony with nature, being a part of it. It is a racial memory, a longing for something we never had ourselves, yet long for anyway.

When we look at these photos, it makes us feel good to know that nature is still out there, waiting for us to visit. Don't forget there is a beautiful world out there, beyond the concrete, plastic and metal modern life is built with. Don't forget there is more to life than human culture, don't forget our roots. Enjoy this beautiful photo series of our mother nature.

A fire tornado blazes near Curtin Springs, Australia, in a still of a recently released video.

Chris Tangey of Alice Springs Film and Television was filming a wildfire when a small twister touched down, "causing it to build into a spinning flame," according to Australia's WPTV.com. (Watch a video of the fire tornado.)

Also known as fire whirls, fire devils, or even firenados, these whirlwinds of flame are not really rare, just rarely documented, Jason Forthofer, a mechanical engineer at the U.S. Forest Services's Missoula Fire Sciences Laboratory in Montana, said in 2010. (Also see "Fire Tornado Seen Spinning Over Hungary.")

As Tangey told Northern Territory News, "It sounded like a jet fighter going by, yet there wasn't a breath of wind where we were."

Nieve penitente, or penitent snow, are collections of spires that resemble robed monks—or penitents. They are flattened columns of snow wider at the base than at the tip and can range in height from 3 to 20 feet (1 to 6 meters). The picture above shows the phenomenon in central Chile. (See pictures of the patterns in snow and ice.)

Nieve penitente tend to form in shallow valleys where the snow is deep and the sun doesn't shine at too steep an angle, said Kenneth Libbrecht, a physicist at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena who studies ice crystal formation.

As the snow melts, dirt gets mixed in with the runoff and collects in little pools here and there, he said. Since the dirt is darker in color than the surrounding snow, the dirty areas melt faster "and you end up digging these pits," explained Libbrecht.

"They tend to form at high altitude," he said. But other than that, no one really knows the exact conditions that are needed to form penitent snow.